Saturday, 19 January 2013

Faecal Transplants Through the Medium of Cartoons

Faecal transplants are highly effective in treating recurrent Clostridium difficile infections compared to conventional antibiotics. The transplants proved so successful that the trial was stopped early to give other patients the chance to benefit from this slightly icky-sounding treatment, which is proposed to repopulate the gut with good bacteria to suppress the growth of Clostridium difficile. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

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Oh, what's that? You're confused about the dramatic change from those word-things to the above explosion of anthropomorphised microbes? So I am trying something new - cartoon-based explanations of new scientific papers (Sci-toons?). I figured there are already many, many people writing about science on the internet, but how many illustrate their articles with vaguely menacing pictures of bacteria? Not many (although maybe there's a reason for this)!